


On Tongue's Edge

by visua1a2t



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Death, Cutting, Death, Depression, Drowning, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Overdosing, Sadstuck, Self-Harm, Suicide, its not fun times ok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-09
Updated: 2014-08-09
Packaged: 2018-02-12 10:37:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2106591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/visua1a2t/pseuds/visua1a2t
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave Strider doesn't know what's worse; living his entire life riddled with missing pieces - or finally finding them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Tongue's Edge

You run a well-worn hand across your face, trying to focus on the sensory touch you wouldn't have noticed years ago. You're tired and your head feels like its been gifted a first class seat on a junkyard car's last drive into the afterlife via crushing, but it's okay.  


It's okay, it's okay, it's okay.  


There's tears streaming down your cheeks like molten magma and you flinch away from it like it actually burns because you think it does. You're face burns red hot and you can get through this because it's alright. Those grating nails carelessly dragging down and deep into your rib cage just means you are feeling, and when you were sixteen you had to go to great lengths just to feel this kind of pain. To feel anything, really. You dash your tongue over your broken mouth, close your eyes, taking in a ragged breath. You're completely here and it feels real it feels so real remember what you had to do to feel this placed in reality it's okay it's okay it's fucking okay.  


A sob rattles you, and then a bitter bark of a laugh chokes out of your chapped lips. You smear the water away from your eyes with the tips of your fingers roughly. You've never felt this close to being whole and you can't stand the emptiness. If you could warp time like you were able to dissect and reconstruct broken notes dancing in the air still too flat to properly glide, you might just tell that kid floundering so deep in numbness and blood to just stay there. Or cut deeper next time. What magical blue fairy planted their false hopes in your desperate, grasping hands and made you think you wanted to feel real? To feel anything? You can see the iron-tainted puddle form around you as if you had just Back To The Future'd this bitch, and your fingers twitch towards the hallucination.  


People always say that drowning is peaceful, and you beg to fucking differ. Your lungs visit the Seven Realms of Hell, clutching and begging like an old hag, just please some air just please please some oxygen I'll give you anything please oh god I don't want to die please the last hot pocket even my first born son anything oh god please and the merciless darkness will calmly scrape against the lining of your lung tissue, deaf to your regrets, and replace all of your fluids with dark, choking black ink the color of a crow's wing and the last thought that will rack your slowly quieting mind is that the sun was coming up, and right now, bobbing lazily under the water, is the only time you really ever looked at it. You're last remnants of o2 escaping your blue lips will be the attempts at a laugh, and then the dark, black liquid will taint the water and force down your throat, slicking the wings of your soul in it's oily substance and rendering them flightless. You know. You really fucking do. And yet you aren't in the ocean with itchy rope cutting into your scarred skin bro isn't here to drag your ass back to the shore and you still can't breathe and you think it's worse.  


You think it's worse it's worse it's worse.  


It's worse because everything is working but everything isn't working. You're chest is expanding and contracting like its working, and your tear-stained mouth gulps at air while you hyperventilate like it's working, but it's not it's not it's not. A part of you, deep in the corners of your mind, tries to relish these crippling emotions, tries to taste them with a forked tongue tainted with curiosity and a foreign sort of innocence, wants to cradle the feelings it's so use to not having felt, but it crawls back into the monster of your subconscious at the first lick. It tastes like stomach acid and steaming hot gasoline. Maybe those years of unfeeling sadness had something to them, at least they tasted cool as the air lapped at your wounds, as if the very wind was trying to stop your bleeding.  


You move your hand to the liquor cabinet, because you're sure teenage Dave had something up his sleeve besides ruined skin and bad dreams and you still have liquid apathy in a shot glass. Shit, no, a full glass. You think of your mother, then, maybe she's silently approving of the way you're handling your problems. Did she feel this way, too? You use it to chase down the rest of your sister's happiness, and almost text her to reprimand her for still not regularly taking them. She always got it, always understood you. The feeling everything around you didn't exist or that maybe you didn't quite exist with everything that was around you, like a penguin born in the Amazon. You knew nothing of cold blizzards and cool fish but it was inked into your very being and it was missing. You wonder vaguely if she'll refill it.  


You're name is Dave Strider, and you're entire life has been filled with words glued to the back of your throat you've never been able to vocalize and with memories so tangible they could be a refreshing mirage if you were ever able to remember them. You're existence has rotated around a song itching at the back of your skull with a lost melody and mumbled lyrics. A bleeding sadness with a cause you can't ever place, but always able to run your fingertips over the ragged tear it had adorned you with. Everyday has been a struggle to try and patch the chunking hole gaping in your abdomen, but you've never been skilled at repairs and the best you were ever able to do was a black tarp secured with safety pins and staples to keep out the howling rain.  


And after years of tasting bile on your tongue and pretending to feel a shrink's pitiful circles on the back of your hand, you finally found that piece of you that shook your bones electric-white like the vibrations of a lovers laugh, that had long since spread its wings and bustled away like a note from a good friend you haven't spoken to in years wishing you well being carried away in the whistling wind.  


You found all your missing pieces six feet under and labeled John Egbert, Good Friend and Beloved Son, on a slab of chipped grey granite today.


End file.
